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<h2>Why using a font manager</h2>

<p>This question pops up every now and then. Really, why? Aren't people just 
happy with what they've got? Isn't just installing and deinstalling fonts the 
usual way good enough? Here are several reasons.</p>

<p>Designers working by contracts are doomed to use a variety of fonts, because 
every client is special (well, at least that's what clients like to hear, don't 
they?) and has his/her own preferences and ideas about what suits and what 
doesn't suit a particular task; because design tasks are actually different. 
They really are.</p>

<p>So we are talking here about collections of fonts that are as large as 3.000 
fonts. Or 5.000 fonts. Decorative freeware fonts, licensed fonts, very 
expensive licensed font families with over 20 faces and so on. Keeping all of them 
loaded in the system is likely to slow it down and make browsing through fonts 
lists a living hell. Which means you need some tool to activate and deactivate 
fonts selectively.</p>

<p>OK, so convinient activation and deactivation. What else? Searching. If you 
have over 1K of fonts you might as well want being able to find the font you 
need as soon as possible given that usually you have only a basic idea about 
what you need. So you want to compare them: type in some text and see how all 
candidates render this text, then pick the one that suits the job best.</p>

<p>So, that's it? No. How about grouping some fonts? Think of branding projects. 
You create a whole package&nbsp;&mdash; website, brochures, business cards 
etc.&nbsp;&mdash; and use a fixed set of fonts that you worked out after hours 
of being shouted at by a highly paid manager in an expensive suite. At any time 
you have to be able to quickly enable these fonts in the system to create a new 
brochure or a new bunch of business cards for this client (big companies do 
reorder them once a month or two). Font managers are here to help you by 
providing tagging system.</p>

<p>Now imagine that you work for a font foundry... Okay, okay, you hate these 
big companies, they just don't understand the digital age of typography... 
yadda-yadda... Whatever. So, your job is to promote fonts that you do. The most 
convinient way is to create a so called font book&nbsp;&mdash; an album 
displaying how same text is rendered using some fonts. You want it now and you 
want it quick. Font managers are your friends again: you filter the whole 
collection to select just the fonts you want in the font book and in few more 
clicks you have a PDF file ready to be uploaded or printed.</p>

<p>And the last bit. If you ever used complex design software, you know that 
sometimes it finds a corrupt font and refuses to work. The traditional way to 
fix this is to remove one half of the collection and try again. If the 
application is still refusing to load, you take away half of this half and try 
again. So after spending an hour of your precious time on this stupid research 
you find the blasted .ttf, bang it against trash bin and think: "How could I 
possibly avoid waisting my time on this the next time?" Unbelievable, but the 
answer is font managers again: they often have built-in font validation tools 
that help finding problematic fonts and deactivating them temporarily.</p>

<p>All in all, if you are graphic or font designer, you just need a font 
manager. And if you are just a user who got this fontmatrix package 
in his Linux distribution installed by default and are wondering now what on 
Earth you are supposed to do with it, you probably have a good idea by now.</p>

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